Being A Woman – A Creative Act

This article was written for the anthroposophic German magazine info3 and (roughly) translated for you! As always, comments are very welcome!

What does it mean to be a woman today?

We as women who write and read articles like these are
self-determined, free and independent. It took humanity a long evolutionary journey
to make this possible. From being nothing more than slaves in much of early
history, women evolved into the clearly defined  roles of traditional societies and on, into
the good woman of the industrial age
– the keeper of home and morality. Only the suffragettes and then the women of
the 1960s began to search for their place and vision in society, in large
numbers and single-pointedly. Women today are the product of this long journey.
We have gotten used to surviving and providing for ourselves without needing a
man or a clan. Our bodies are our own, we are more highly educated, wealthier
and have more experience in the world than ever. We are living our own lives and are taking more and
more responsibility in all parts of society.

All this is what it means to be a woman today. But looking a
little further and deeper, at the question of what it will or could mean, at our
possible next steps, the picture becomes a lot more complex and layered. While
we were catching up with everything patriarchy had denied us, the path ahead
was very clear. But is there more for us to do, who have grown up with all the
advantages and privileges of women’s hard won freedom. What can or will it mean to be a woman now and in the future? The following
thoughts are based on the perspective, that spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen
developed in his work and investigation with the women at his organization
EnlightenNext*.

Many say that the ‘third wave’ of feminism, after the
suffrage and the sixties has the task to bring the rights of women to those
parts of the world, in which they are still being grossly and painfully
ignored. This is very important work – it is now a widely accepted fact that a
society evolves radically as soon as the living conditions of its women
improve.

But what does that mean for us, here, in privileged Europe
and the US?  And is there an answer to
this question that takes more than survival and material values into account?

For years people have been calling for honoring the ‘divine
feminine’, fostering the feminine in public life, supporting ‘female’ qualities
in the boardrooms of international corporations and in politics. Often these
qualities are described as empathy, willingness to cooperate, compassion, care,
receptivity and intuition. And though all of these can only be positive, they
are in many ways the exact attributes by which women have traditionally been
defined and in which we felt caught. Is this step really anything new, then? Or
are we simply expanding old stereotypes into new territory?

Does being a woman mean anything outside of these pre-defined qualities? At the time of integral
theory, developmental psychology, an evolutionary world-view , evolutionary
spirituality and unprecedented self-determination could being a woman also be a
creative act? What would radical
change, comparable to the one in the sixties look like today, at this stage in
our journey? A deep re-orientation, that completely redefines the meaning of
the word woman, in the way our
sisters dared to push for in the past?

A universal force that
makes its way through me

For a possible answer to this question let’s switch – from the
historical wide-angle-lens to a zoom:

Let’s take this act of writing for instance. Something wants
to be expressed, something that does not care, whether I happen to be inspired,
tired, insecure or very clear in my head. Something keeps me at the computer,
something for which I am struggling for clarity and precision. An inner
pressure, not clearly defined, but unmistakable as well. Does this creative
force have a gender? Does it have anything to do with me being a woman? I don’t
think so. It is a universal force that is entering the world through me, a woman. It does not have a
face. Certainly, my expression is
colored by the fact that I am a woman, but the force itself does not have a
gender, and maybe that is one of the reasons, why we feel so free when we are creatively engaged.

Another example: Outside my window the sun is sinking into
the spring-green tops of maples. When I watch it, is my perception, the
attention itself, female? Or does only the interpretation
of what I am seeing have a possible feminine flavor? Isn’t pure experience,
seeing itself, free from gender?

And let’s take sex. Dose the sexual impulse have a gender? Or
is it the urge to ensure the continuation of the human race, experienced in
female and male form and utterly impersonal, just perceived differently in a
female or male form? The urge itself is just that, an urge, a force – un-gendered.

And then there is the experience of meditation, the experience
of consciousness. This too has no gender. It is utterly free of all attributes, pure, clear awareness,
an indivisible One that is neither male nor female.

A spiritual freedom that is independent of outer circumstances

The deeper we go into ourselves the clearer we can perceive
that we are truly free. This is a spiritual
freedom independent of outer, relative circumstances. Before I am a woman,
I am a human being. Before I am a human being, I am consciousness. And in all
of it I am part of an immeasurably vast creative process called evolution. The
fact that – maybe even just in this particular lifetime – I happen to be born
as a woman then has a very different weight and significance. It is this
insight that for me points to the next step towards a next step, a  new consciousness for women.

Back to the wide angle lens  –

Women still have a lot less influence than men in the big
decisions of the world. Due to their roles as wives and mothers throughout the
millenia we had a lot less opportunities to gather experience in what it means
to shape culture and history.  In spite
of many exceptional and outstanding individual women, their numbers among those
who catalyzed deep, broad and lasting change is relatively small. And though we
are catching up fast, we have far fewer leading examples in politics, science
and religion than men do and no real, living understanding of our own history.  This is a crucial part of our self-knowledge -
It took me more than a decade to even begin to understand how important it is
to look at one’s own experience in a historical and cultural context.

Our time seems to demand a deep change from women and  from
men – gender roles are being rewritten everywhere and the question is from what
perspective we want to shape these new roles, which values we want to take
along and which we want to leave behind.

The thought-patterns and attitudes that have shaped us over
thousands of years have not just been extinguished by the change of the past 50
or 100 years. This shows in many ways: When we feel torn at work between using
the tried-and proven tactic of manipulation versus the clear, yet very uncomfortable
and often unappreciated direct instructions; when we enjoy wearing high heels
but are quietly worried about betraying our feminist principles in that (as
well as ruin our backs), when we long for a child yet are afraid to lose our
independence – all these are the often contradictory values arising from the
layers of biology, history and culture that form our selves, pulling at us.

Never before in history have women had so much choice. Never
were we, in such numbers and to such measure aware of so much – from our history
to our emotional and psychological structures to the unlimited depth of
ourselves and the fact that we too are directly tied into a creative process of
development.

Being a lot more than
what we are used to call ‘woman’

Based on this consciousness and the wealth of our experience
we have the unprecedented possibility to define the feminine (as well as the masculine)
anew. And with that a new kind of partnership that transcends the usual gender
limitations because it takes as its basis the genderless aspects of the self. This is a radical vision, a real
utopia, that I am only beginning to sense and to understand, but which is all
the more compelling and fascinating .

In this scenario, women can deeply trust in life. We can let
go and meet in a kind of intimacy, that is fundamentally based on what is most
real and true rather than on –often fleeting –personal sympathy. They can
independently and creatively work together towards their own destiny and leave
behind the age-old patterns of competition, manipulation and distrust in the
discovery of being more, a lot more, than what we are used to calling a
‘woman’.

This sense of self is anchored in a part of the self that
breaks the boundaries of being a woman: the growing conviction and decision to
trust more in the deepest part of the self that is already free, rather than the
more superficial layers of our experience – anything that is relative, passing,
circumstantial. This new identification allows unlimited spirit to enter and
work in the world directly. This may be the most revolutionary and biggest gift
we can give to women of future generations.

The Contradiction

A couple of weeks ago I attended a retreat on Evolutionary Enlightenment with Andrew Cohen. A woman raised the topic of women’s liberation. She described, how many of us women are still concerned, first and foremost, with finding a – or the right kind of – man.

Andrew was impressed with her honesty and asked her, why that would be the case. ‘Do men make you that happy?‘ he asked. Every woman in the room burst into laughter, proof for how deeply we know that is not the case.

Why do we live in such a contradiction?

The longing for and the desire for a man emerges from parts of ourselves buried deep within our biology and the history of our gender.

For one, and this is nothing new, the survival of our species depended on us being drawn to men, and them to us. In fact, this is, dare I say it, the prime reason we are drawn to each other, whether we intend to produce babies or not.

And related to that is the fact that for thousands of years, men acted as guarantors for the physical survival and security for women –even if they enslaved, abused or traded them, their power meant they were the source of any protection and safety.

It is sobering –to put it mildly – but also clarifying to look at these roots of our longing and ask the question anew: why are we still spending so much time and energy attracting Mr. Right, while knowing perfectly well, that our needs have changed and that we will not find lasting, profound happiness in any sexual relationship or romance?  (That does not mean that they cannot be beautiful or significant, but the fundamental approach to them would be different.) The current conclusion is that men should adapt to our changing needs – but does that make sense? Is that fair? And even possible?

I think it is a lot more exciting to look at exactly what it is at this point in our history and development that truly gives us fulfillment. In my experience this has to do with a higher creativity, self-realization in the biggest sense and deeper spiritual development – none of which men have the power to bestow upon us in the context of a sexual relationship. What is possible though is that our independence in these matters enables us to meet and come together in new, more satisfying and deeper ways.

Then our lives do no longer run contrary to our intelligence.

Leaving each other alone

A couple of days ago, Andrew Cohen gave another teaching on relationships in the context of Evolutionary Enlightenment. Everything he said would be worth writing about, but I want to pull out one particular point, that I have been thinking about, struggling with and appreciating a lot lately. He said, and I am paraphrasing in my own words, that because in Evolutionary Enlightenment a lot of emphasis is placed on strong and deep relationships between women with other women and men with other men, and because the foundation of trust is the most important aspect of any relationship, you can, as a couple, leave each other alone.

When I got together with R, in the context of Andrew’s teaching, I decided that I would resist the temptation to get into any psychological discussions, analysis or interpretation. This has been a very powerful stand – not that I do it perfectly, or that it might even be interesting at times, but there is no comparison to how obsessed I was in previous relationships about figuring out where my partner or I were coming from, what our motives were and why etc. etc. Thankfully, the teaching provides a very different foundation and even more luckily, we are both committed to them.

Still, holding myself to this decision can be hard – the past few days I felt like the habit of compulsively wanting to improve on R, or spin intricate theories about how he is and why he does what he does, was literally burning itself out in me. All I could do was hold still while this desire was raging on and on. Maybe this is how a guy feels when he doesn’t pursue that attractive women at the party, I thought to myself. Then it dropped. And everything looked different, especially R and myself.

Wanting

I open my eyes in the morning and want. Something. Just because R is there, in bed, next to me, I think that somehow I deserve his attention. Now, immediately, or whenever I think of it or – did I mention that? - want it. It seems so natural – on the way to the bathroom, I look for his eyes, a recognition, automatically, just to be sure, as though I wasn’t convinced yet that he loves me, that he is here – has been for almost two years now! As though all my fibers are programmed to want, endlessly, insatiably, like a sponge ready to soak it all up. And what exactly?

R just lives, while my eyes are turned on him more often than I want to admit, if not outwardly, then inwardly. It’s a program. It runs automatically, I don’t have to chose it. Maybe years ago it served women well to keep an eye out, to make sure we still had our masters benevolence and attention – anything less might have meant death. Maybe it is now wired into our genes, in our so called ‘nature’. And there might be many other reasons, I would love to hear your comments on that!

Now I can chose. I am practising to leave it, him and myself alone. Did an experiment- to act more like him – going about my business, leaving what is between us alone. It is such a relief! Then, suddenly, we meet, unexpectedly, free, without the greedy hand inside of me grabbing a hold of any attention.

Mad Men and Waking Woman

Mad Men, the television series, just started its fourth season. I am still finishing up season 3 and keep being struck by how incredibly well these TV writers managed to capture the subtle and also radical changes in the way, people, and especially women at that time, saw the world and themselves.

It was almost a shock to recognize the lack of any sense of self in women 50 years ago- the doll-like quality in which most of them moved through life, utterly captivated with the superficial appearances of things, including themselves, and not having the faintest sense of responsibility for any of it.

(As an aside – this movie explained both my mother’s passivity and my fathers relentless infidelity more clearly than any of my psychological musings about their past. They were, just like all of us are, more than anything products of their time, a time in which men had no sense of restraint or doubt about following their sexual instincts from one bed into the next. Remorse wasn’t even part of the picture, as the person they were betraying was barely a person at all.)

The most impressive aspect of the show for me is the way, the series portrays the emergence of women as people, as self-determined creatures with an opinion, a sense of dignity and self-respect. Betty for example, one of the main characters, moves from being sent to psychoanalysis by her womanizing husband, who then checks in with her therapist about her neurosis, to a women who kicks her husband out of the house. It is almost inconceivable to imagine, what it would be like to live without this sense of being a self-determined person - it seems so very natural today. And at the same time, it is just as striking  how much us women today still ARE like those in Mad Men. How much of Betty and Joan and Peggy lives on in me. 

 Some women friends and I had amazing conversation about this last night. We recognized that we, inspite of several decades of women’s liberation,  for example still leave the lead to the man sexually and how compulsively we identify with our bodies. How we use our attractivenss and seductiveness, our sexual power, in order to not just get affirmation, but also avoid conflict and manipulate those around us to get what we want.

We recognized that for thousands of years, our bodies and our sexuality  have been the prime currency to survive, as wives, concubines, prostitutes etc. and that unless we find something else, better, higher, that gives us strength and support, we won’t let go of this quite primitive way of being. Speaking about this it became clear to us that our very discussion, with all its objectivity and vulnerability was born out of the movement to become conscious of these things, the desire to go beyond them, and  was the expression of a kind of relationship, that can be a new safe place for women. It was thrilling beyond words, and a far cry from the competitiveness and distrust we experience with each other so frequently, as long as we identify our selves with our sexual power.

A Liberated Relationship To Sexuality

It’s not because of lack of material that I haven’t written in such a long time – sorry! – it’s rather too much of it and not enough time to digest it all here. Life has a way of coming up with powerful, beautiful and subtle as well as frightening and overwhelming things in a way that makes the mind and our understanding look like snail-mail.

So to make up and gain a bit more breathing room – I still need to urgently finish the german version of the book! –  I am going to post a piece my friend Elisa has written about her expereince of celibacy – something rather unusual these days. Here she is. Thanks Elisa!

A Liberated Relationship To Sexuality

By Elisa Mishory

As a student of Andrew Cohen’s I spent six years in a formal celibacy practice that transformed me into a sane human being. Having grown up in Los Angeles in the 1970’s, I had had a very “liberal” education on sex. Though I didn’t feel at home as a “valley girl”, in many respects that is indeed what I was. Sex, drugs and rock and roll were driving forces in LA culture, and in my peer group it was anathema to reach your Sweet Sixteen still, well, ‘sweet and innocent’. This sexually charged environment was reinforced by my experience as an only child of a single mother with nearly no male family members, which left me feeling starved for male attention. And then there was my first high school job working as a cashier in a large men’s clothiers, and needless to say, my Sweet Sixteen was right on schedule!

Following high school and months of solo travel, I attended a very progressive California University. In those days at the University of California Santa Cruz, the co-eds studied naked in a big meadow next to our co-ed apartments, and women strutted around campus unselfconsciously topless. Though this was the end of the 70’s, in Santa Cruz the free love era of the 60’s lived on. I had relationships, but they tended to be brief, dramatic, or a combination of both. Though I wouldn’t have admitted it to myself at the time, the whole arena of sexual relationships was empty and traumatic.

At the age of 31 I met Andrew Cohen while traveling in India. Though I was pursuing spiritual teachings, I wasn’t looking for a spiritual teacher… but when I heard Andrew speak I knew that he was the embodied answer to the authenticity and integrity I had longed for since childhood. He immediately clued in to my excessively sensual relationship to life and suggested celibacy to me early on. It was a shocking notion to me, and not something I was readily willing to consider. As unsatisfying as my sexual relationships ultimately tended to be, my identity as a woman was completely tied up with my sense of sexual power.  I still believed that someday I’d find “the one” who would make me happy, despite the rather clocklike recurrence of bad endings. It just seemed so “unnatural” to give up sex.

I remember a very significant conversation I had with Andrew, about six months after I’d moved into one of the group houses in Marin County, where Andrew lived and taught. I had just returned from a cross-country sales trip for my fledgling business, and was frustrated with myself for having succumbed to a meaningless one-night stand. I went to speak with Andrew and ask to become celibate, as by this point I felt the only way I was going to gain control over myself would be to more or less lock myself away in this formal practice. (In those days, celibate practitioners in Andrew’s community shaved their heads to reinforce the renunciation and to take time out from the “image” game, and I felt that this would effectively curtail my ability to play the field.) Andrew’s response to me was completely thoughtful and caring. He told me that renunciation was not something one could impose on oneself, that I would never succeed that way, but that I should just start to pay attention to what was driving me—what was motivating my choices. This advice was a watershed for me. I started to get in touch with a variety of psychological motivations that actually had nothing to do with sex. No wonder I wasn’t getting what I really wanted – I hadn’t even been straight with myself about what I was really after! And then I started to see how conditioned and unfree I truly was. When sexual impulses arose, I had such a limited range of responses. I acted like a robot—quite predictable—a pawn of biological forces. The longing to have the freedom to respond as a whole human being and not just as a woman with an out of control libido, led me to a genuine desire to take time out from the whole arena of sexuality.

What makes Andrew one of the most powerful teachers and guides for this practice is his own deep inquiry and exploration into the topic of sexuality, as well as his profound integrity.  I seriously doubt that there are many communities (if any) – spiritual or otherwise, that have had more sexual integrity than EnlightenNext. In more than 20 years there has been almost no sexual corruption among Andrew’s students whatsoever, and that is only due to Andrew’s lead. He has spoken often about the overwhelming power of the sexual impulse, about how much humility one must have in the face of it, and of the tremendous benefit of taking time out to gain perspective. One need only look to the number of enlightened teachers in the 20^th Century who were brought to their knees by indulging in inappropriate sexual relations with their students. And the Catholic Church is the latest example. There is simply so much cynicism in the world today because people have not seriously looked into the whole arena of sexuality for themselves.

I never dreamed I’d spend a full six years as a formal celibate, and honestly, most of the time it was extremely challenging. We discovered, surprisingly, that women struggle much more in the practice than men do. Men may believe that if they don’t have sex they’ll die, but once they committed to the practice, they had more integrity than the women. Andrew was often stunned that the women would continue to dress immodestly, or that our conversations in celibacy meetings would be anything but “cool” in relationship to this hot topic, or that we would blatantly break the practice by satisfying ourselves.  He wouldn’t hesitate to berate us quite sharply… always with a view to the fact that this practice, when taken absolutely seriously, could have the power to enlighten. And there was no sense in doing the practice if one wasn’t making every effort to act with integrity.

In my time as a celibate we never really embraced the true renunciate life as Andrew envisioned it, free from wanting and gender identity. Nonetheless, the practice of renunciation (because it definitely required practice) strengthened me more than any other spiritual practice I’ve done before or since. It gave me a core of self-respect where there had been none, and has truly afforded me a liberated response to the sexual impulse rather than the robotic and conditioned response I described before. It gave me backbone and humility. Now I can’t imagine a life where I had’t had the opportunity to experience the liberating power of renunciation.

There is so much to be said about the freedom that comes from ceasing to identify with sexual power, and how much confidence is gained by learning to sit still through the fires of desire and rest in coolness. Andrew always said that celibacy and relationship should ultimately be one and the same practice, and after three years in a wonderful relationship, I now understand what Andrew was always pointing to. Gone is the attraction to drama and destructive passion, and in its place are trust, care, and the freedom from needing another person to “complete” me.

While I ultimately decided to leave Andrew’s formal community a couple of years ago, this practice lives in me, and it often occurs to me that if I had not met Andrew and learned the beauty of celibacy, I would most likely have been destined to repeat the mistakes of my mother, grandmother, aunts and friends, victimized by the ferocity of the sexual impulse, instead of living a liberated relationship to it. 

Relationships And The Holocaust

On Thursday I missed my plane to Germany because I left my passport in my office – no, I literally completely unconsciously – unpacked it and left it behind, while multi-tasking. They say our brains can’t cope with doing too much at one, and they seem to be right.

The reason I most wanted to go was an event in Berlin titled The Holocaust – From Trauma To The Power of Responsibility. My spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen, as well as Austrian teacher Thomas Hübl were going to speak to a crowd of more than a thousand people. Staying behind I wanted to still be in touch with the event and so listened to an interview, the German edition of EnlightenNext magazine once did with a German psychologist, Ingo Jahrsetz. He has made it his work to reveal and respond to the many ways, in which the holocaust lives on, not just as a memory of an unimaginable historical event, but in the ways Germans, and Jews as well, experience their lives, think and relate to each other.

This topic is always on my mind – almost all my clients are Jewish, most of my girl-friends as well, and I am beginning to see in my own experience and also in my parents, who were born during the war, and others of their generation, the signs of what Jahrsetz calls the ‘culture of silence’. This culture is alive both in Jewish and German families and his thesis is, that unless we confront the effect of the holocaust and the war in the way it is part of our experience right now, we will keep passing it on to other generations to deal with.

One of its aspects for Germans is the sense that ‘everything is too much.’ My aunt, my father, many in our family say that and mean, that they need to withdraw, to be alone, to look after themselves. For a long time I thought it had to do with the narcissism of the budding Me-generation, the inability to be with people. But listening to Jahrsetz last night I was reminded. The holocaust was too much. It was more than is really graspable. And because after 1945 no one talked about it, no one dared look at what such an event meant – for us a Germans, for humanity as a whole – the sentiment ‘too much’ was pushed under the surface to be crossing the traverse to the next generation and the next. I often felt ashamed at the strange outbursts of helplessness and fury I experienced as a teenager, when someone was riding a noisy motorbike through the quiet of the forest, or trees were cut down to make room for a house. The out-of-proportion intensity of feelings reminded me of my fathers anger attacks and my mothers inexplicable tears -  I did not want to be like them. Now, these feelings still arise, but I am starting to understand them in this larger context, rather than just trying to cut them off.

Since knowing my spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen, I have learned that being human is something I need to learn, we, as a culture need to learn. To be able to bear insecurity, helplessness, intimacy, difficulty. I learn it from friends that are not German, and especially my Jewish friends. Over the years, a lot of trust has grown, to the point where we can now speak much more freely and openly about each of our ways of clinging to our cultural programming. The laughter, the ease and the trust we share carry with them an undeniable pain and great responsibility.

Caution, Feelings!

Women are often described as the ‚feeling’ sex. We seem to live closer to the source of tears, guilt, insecurity as well as care, compassion and sensitivity. Today, these latter qualities are increasingly recognized as badly lacking in our culture and as important for its development. Even in boardrooms and management circles so called ‘feminine’, more intuitive, less competitive and more sensitive intelligence is being called for more and more. It s a big step forward from Freud and his assessment of the female psyche.

 I think it is worth pulling this idea apart a little, simply because feelings are such tricky business, and often unreliable to say the least!

 For one, they are often triggered by things that have nothing to do with the reality at hand – see psychotherapy. We blow a fuse or pull back in distrust simply because some unsuspecting other is, often preconsciously – reminding us of our parents, our teacher or, if we want to go that far, an event or person in another lifetime altogether.

 Hormones are another source of – often very strong and convincing – feelings. I know it might be an extreme example, but for years I left my boyfriend almost on a monthly basis, simply because my perspective, and what I felt about him, seemed to turn on its head every time, my period rolled around. Even tough I started to become aware of that pattern and vowed to myself, not to blindly believe my feelings during those potent seven days prior to menstruating, J , when push came to shove I fell for it once again.

And then there is falling in love – one of the strongest feelings of all, perhaps, that always turns out to have questionable relevance to reality.

 Some spiritual circles I lived in for a long time elevated feelings over reason – as deeper, wiser, more important – being ‘heady’ wasn’t a compliment!

 So after thirty years of giving undisputed reign to feelings I am increasingly interested in looking more closely at the connection of feelings to reality, to discover, how compulsive and automatic our relationship to them usually is. A romantic relationship, but really all relationships, are fertile ground for that! Is something true just because I feel it? We often live as though it is, unquestioned, and even though we might think we know better. Can feelings be objectified and can we find accesss to a deeper plain of reality in that? There are signs for that.

 To be continued in the next blog, where I’ll explore this more in relationship to depression, something a lot of women seem to be struggling with these days.

The end of Lap-Dancing (at least in Iceland)

A friend sent me this article from the Guardian, describing how Iceland, the only nation with an openly lesbian head of state, has now put a ban on all strip clubs. It’s quite moving. We have gotten so used to the idea, that one way or another sex will always be for sale. I could feel the kind of hardness that goes with this idea and that I usually donlt even notice. The article quotes the politician who first proposed the ban as saying:  ”It is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold.”  Right?

One aspect of the discussion about making sex-work illegal has always been that women want that kind of work and that making it illegal would harm them more than it helps by pushing the trade underground. But after I read this and thought about it for a while, I can’t agree.  It’s a bit like saying we should keep slavery because it provides jobs – I think. The fact that women might not be concerned about or in touch with the larger context of objectification that this kind of service perpetuates, does not make it less urgent to change it. Without a stand like this, a new standard, even if it takes decades or even centuries to become the norm, can not be born.

I am very curious what you think about this!

The Goal Is Peace

I had a great conversation with a friend last night.  Both of us are students of  A. Cohen, and according to him, one of the highest achievements in sexual relationships is peace – being together without creating karma, which can be defined as creating pain and suffering for others out of ignorance or lack of care. When I first heard this, it seemed like a pretty modest goal – after all, I was used and conditioned to expect a lot from my partners: from ultimate fulfillment and ecstasy to merging with another and even enlightenment, the transcendence of personal self. So simply not creating karma seemed, to put it mildly, kind of lukewarm. But the longer I am living with and contemplating this goal, the bigger I realize it is. So often, simply because we spend a lot of time with someone, we begin to feel entitled to share the less palatable aspects of ourselves. We almost begin to make the other part of ourselves, our mind and all the garbage in it and stop holding ourselves to the standard, we set out with. In the beginning, the very best intentions are put into action almost naturally – you realize, how precious and delicate it actually is to have a man and a woman be together in peace, in respect, without clinging and dependence and in trust. Over time, old mind-patterns just come back and your perspective changes – unless there is a very strong commitment to stay awake. I read that there have been studies that people, when they are in love, temporarily can live at a higher level of contentment and happiness than they are used to on their own, but they always slide back to their regular ways. How familiar is that??? So in terms of the goal of creating a peaceful and karma-free space between you, it’s good to know that there is a part in each of us that is perfectly willing, at any moment, to destroy and attack and then to keep that part under wraps with all my might. To me, one of the real meanings of love in this context means to do that more and more.